I’ve got ideas about terminology services and analytics…how about you?

Oct 3, 2017

By Jacob Boye Hansen, Founder & CEO CareCom A/S

CareCom has been working in the clinical terminology space for many years, and in the last 3 years we have seen a consistent interest in analytics. Interest is coming from not only terminology services clients, but health care technology organizations in general. Many healthcare software companies have implemented analytics taking many forms – everything from population health analysis to big data analytics.

CareCom’s terminology server HealthTerm®, is a state of the art enterprise terminology server, with many large organizations implementing our solution. Some clients are using our application for development and maintenance of terminology/classifications such as subsets, mapsets and language translations. Other clients are using the power of the enterprise terminology server for heavy lookup services in a run-time environment, with use cases such as:

Lookup description for a code for any code system (SNOMED CT, LOINC, RxNORM etc.)

Crosswalk from a local/custom code system to a standard code system

Apply content of a specific type of codes in a dropdown list (allergy for example)

Auto-mapping local term to a standard code system, using cognitive intelligence to find the mapping for large amount for terms to be mapped to standards

Is it interesting to know who visit which page in our web-based maintenance tool? It might be for some clients, but most want more detail. All objects in HealthTerm have history logged for all changes, which includes documented date, by whom, publish date and by who and valid from date. HealthTerm has already logged all the information needed for transparency – and analytics of the same information would probably deliver limited value. I agree it would be nice to know who did most mappings or translations of the best quality, but HealthTerm already has statistical reports for this function and brings more detailed information than page analytics.

Big Data Analytics

For all our clients who use our API for lookup or decoration of data, I do see value in big data analytics. Some of my ideas are:

For an HIE client: It could be valuable to know which participating organization contributes codes that are not map to standard; or which organization still reports using ICD-9 codes.

For a hospital accessing HealthTerm through a browser: Which terms are being searched, and does it deliver a result? Is there missing interface terminology content?

From an operations perspective: How fast are lookups and when is the peak access time(s)?

From a clinical perspective: Which diseases are most often observed together?

From a reimbursement perspective: Which measures are achieved by which organizations?

From a financial perspective: Which costly drugs are used by which organizations?

To answer the call of our current and prospective client analytics use cases, HealthTerm added support for IBM Analytics tool. This new feature logs all web-service calls with input and output parameters as well as performance data.

I imagine that there are many more valuable use cases, especially when we apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) indexing on free text in clinical notes. (You can read more about this on my next blog). In the meantime, let me know more about your high value use case(s) utilizing terminology analytics. What do you think is the highest value use case for big data analytics?

HealthTerm handles all tasks related to terminologies, code systems and structured content – from creation of a new code system to translation of international code systems or mappings between local code lists and international standards.

HealthTerm is unique in having a full set of tools to create and maintain all types of code systems and at the same time, it has the performance/security to handle the biggest healthcare enterprises on run-time look-up.

Orion is excited to announce our migration to HealthTerm. The flexibility combined with the high quality control of HealthTerm's tooling is by far the best the market offers today. We offer our customers a complete tooling package with everything from ease of use, maintenance of local code systems and mapping to a huge range of standard code systems based on international process standards with workflow control and process statistics. Additionally the software enables handling multi lingual processing on the fly, patient friendly and clinician friendly terms. Thousands of subset for customers to use in their applications come as standard e.g. for quality measure reporting (CQMs) and detailed support for semantic ontologies.